Banshee Reeks

You have a car accident and when the rescue squad arrives they find you unconcious with a GPSr in one hand and a PDA in the other. You show your vacation pictures to your friends and they consist of old tree trunks, fallen trees, pictures of kitchen containers in natural settings and several pictures of your family posed like tourists in front of virtual caches holding your GPSr. Your Birthday cake is a rectangular shape and has olive drab icing. The candles are bison tubes with a flaming cache log paper sticking out of each one. You take batteries out of your digital camera to feed the GPSr. You forget a pen so try to use a sharp stick and a leaf as natural "carbon paper" to sign the log. You hide the kids presents in the woods in ammo cans and fill the christmas stocking with home made cache pages. The kids draw straws to see who gets to use the family GPSr first. You tell your kids that 2 of the 8 reindeer are named Cacher and Dasher.

I chose the name Banshee Reeks in honor of a large farm used as a wildlife preserve in Northern Virginia where I am a volunteer. It was a fairly quick decision. I happened to have a hat and a shirt with the name on it so adopted it as my screen name. The word "banshee" is a Gaelic term for a female spirit and the word "reeks" is a Gaelic term for hills and dales. Legend has it that around the 1840s, the owner of the farm was of Irish or Scottish decent. After a night in town he came back to the farm and heard strange cries and sounds in the woods, what he thought might have been banshees. Since the farm was very hilly, he is supposed to have said that he heard, "banshees in the reeks." In the years since, the name has become Banshee Reeks.

IN most any but a parking lot or other obviously built up area wearing a pair of binoculars and having a bird book will work. Birders show up in almost any environment. It will help to get to know the local birds in case a birder or interested citizen comes up with the I saw a bird that looks like... that most experienced birders have to deal with frequently.

You can wear a pair of binoculars.. a cheap pair so you don't lose much of mugged When they come closer start checking out the trees. A birdwatcher can be found wherever there are birds.